Finally looking more closely at the first picture in this post, I’d like to say I think the fountain’s water is actually more interesting than the Chihuly glass itself. It might have to do with the contrast of the static attribute of the glass to the dynamic appearance of the water.
Just sayin’.
Hal Hodson reports on a fledgling movement to take back the Internet from the big sites in NewScientist (23 July 2016, paywall):
AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data. …
“Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data – have lost control.
So what’s to be done?
Sambra is working on a project called Solid, which is led by none other than [Tim] Berners-Lee [inventor of the Web] himself. The idea behind this prototype software is to separate our data from the apps and servers that process it. With Solid, you get to decide where your data lives – on your phone, a server at work, or with a cloud provider, as it probably does now. You can even nominate friends to look after it. “We want to put the data in a place where the user controls it,” says Sambra.
Here’s an academic introduction to Solid by Berners-Lee and his team:
Each user stores their data in a Web-accessible personal online datastore (or pod). Each user can have one or more pods from different pod providers, and can easily switch between providers. Applications access data in users’ pods using well defined protocols, and a decentralized authentication and access control mechanism guarantees the privacy of the data. In this decentralized architecture, applications can operate on users’ data wherever it is stored. Users control access to their data, and have the option to switch between applications at any time. We will demonstrate the utility of Solid and how it is experienced from the point of view of end users and application developers. …
Each application (or set of applications based on one social network platform) controls its own data and often has its own authentication and access control mechanisms. As a result, users cannot easily switch between similar applications that could allow reuse of their data, or switch from one data storage service to a different one.
I think that last outtake strikingly summarizes the goal – if, say, there was a Facebook-2 out there, a competitor to Facebook, how hard would it be to switch over to it? Today, difficult – all the information that you value on Facebook, such as “friend” information, groups, etc, is owned by Facebook – Facebook-2 has no access to it. Imagine, if you will, that the information was not owned by Facebook, but was owned by you. This implies that both Facebook’s would have to know how to access your information – and you have given access permission to them – or not. Now the competition is sharpened.
There’s a lot of questions that will be inevitably asked of Solid, assuming it makes progress, both technical and social, and perhaps I’ll pursue them in future posts after digesting the previously linked paper, as it may have answers to many that cross my mind. Instead, I’d rather return to Hodson’s article. This bothers me:
Andy Clarke, a philosopher studying artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that our loss of control goes even deeper. “When we use the internet in the ways it’s mostly available – through big nodes like Google and Facebook – we are giving ourselves away,” says Clarke. They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny. Aral Balkan, founder of Swedish tech democratisation movement Ind.ie, calls such companies “people farmers”. If you’re not paying, you’re the product.
First, tThis strikes me as sloppy thinking. First, the use of the currency metaphor constricts the intellectual discourse to mere money. Rather, let’s ask this: does the work of these “big nodes” benefit us in any way? And the answer may be YES, in that we may be served marketing material for products we actually desire, to come up with just a single example; I suspect there are many more.
Second, all value is subjective: this is standard. All that trivial information associated to you has very little value to you; even as single bits, Google doesn’t care. But aggregated, then it begins to matter. By collecting it (a non-trivial activity) and analyzing it (also non-trivial) they are creating value from the detritus of us. This phrase, “They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny”, is little more than rabble-rousing, and it’s unfortunate that it’s present in this interesting paper on disconnecting data from programs1.
I’d recommend taking a look at that paper (I may need a rainy afternoon, and it’s sunny right now) to see a possible future for the web – whether you’re a technical person or just a web user. It echoes, in my mind, the problems faced by the labor force with respect to unions in that sometimes workers don’t like the activities their unions take, and yet they find they often must belong. One solution has been Right To Work laws, which permit workers to opt out of the unions that represent them, but they are imperfect solutions. And perhaps this analogy is imperfect, but it does stick in my mind.
1I dislike this trendy word “apps”.
ABG was hosting a traveling exhibition of Chihuly Glass. It was quite a lot of glass, which I mostly avoided taking pictures of it, but here’s what we did take. First, my favorite:
And here’s a sequence on another installation:
A special gift shop was full of his material, from books to actual artifacts. I’ve been through his site looking for our favorite, but was not successful. It was $7600, so we don’t feel too bad at not snapping it right up.
On our vacation we visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens (ABG). Omitting mention of our actual travel to ABG and back to the hotel, we had a very good time and would happily recommend it to Atlanta-traveling gardeners. ABG has a number of different areas, from tropics to high altitudes to plants native to the Atlanta area. We’ll start with carnivorous pitcher plants:
As we can see, their pitchers are filled with a fluid which traps and digests the unfortunate insects which slip on the edge of the pitcher. Yes, we did wonder if they had to be specially fed by ABG staff, or if Atlanta insect life was sufficient to the job, but we did not find out. These were found, IIRC, in the tropics part of the displays. In the same area we found this charming orchid:
Three blooms on one orchid, but I fear the photo is a trifle blurry. This was also found in the tropics, I believe:
Charming, but we do not recall the name.
Just an update on the next step in the Flint, MI crisis, from The Detroit News:
Criminal charges leveled Friday against six current and former state employees center around allegations they altered or concealed alarming reports showing high levels of toxic lead in Flint’s water and the bloodstreams of the city’s children.
Attorney General Bill Schuette’s prosecutors contend much of the cover-up occurred on or around the same day in late July last year.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, prosecutors allege employees Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott “buried” an epidemiologist’s July 28, 2015, report showing a significant year-over-year spike in blood lead levels in Flint children.
Corrine Miller, the state’s top epidemiologist, later ordered a DHHS employee to delete emails about that July 28 report and prevented action to alert top state health officials and the public, Schuette said.
A Genesee County judge on Friday authorized charges against Miller, Peeler and Scott for misconduct in office, conspiring to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty related to allegedly concealing or disregarding the test results.
Special Prosecutor Todd Flood’s investigation also found that on same date, three municipal water regulators at the Department of Environmental Quality altered a water-testing report to exclude some samples to keep overall lead levels under the federal limit.
Schuette filed charges against DEQ water quality analyst Adam Rosenthal on Friday for allegedly altering the report in coordination with water regulators Stephen Busch and Michael Prysby, who were charged with similar misconduct crimes in April as part of the attorney general’s wide-ranging investigation.
It occurs to me to wonder: it’s not unheard of to subject potential employees to various tests, such as polygraphs (dubious as they may be), as a condition of employment; and folks seeking admission to the Bar in Minnesota are required to pass an ethics test. I wonder if people working public safety jobs, such as these people, are given ethics tests, and if not, why not? This appears to be a failing of ethics, and since a failure in that area could result in severe injury or death, it would seem appropriate to test for the specialized ethics knowledge peculiar to their work.
I will be morbidly interested in hearing the motivations of these individuals, if found guilty, particularly of Miller, the head epidemiologist. The actions described sound deliberate, and if guilt is found, I’d hope for severe sanctions.
(h/t Steve Benen)
Love & Friendship (2016) is based on Jane Austen’s novel Lady Susan, and, for those unacquainted with this literary genre practically invented by Mz Austen, this is a very droll movie, indeed, so dry that one feels the sands of the desert slowly sifting through one’s mouth as Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), a widow, gradually wreaks carnage throughout her late husband’s family. Having a convenient intimate in Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), we get a view of both sides of the coin, as she plays the men for fools and then details her results and further plans to Alicia in what might be best described as a high sociopathic manner. The traditional mores of society have vanished completely from the metaphorical plateau, and we are delivered tart observations on the foolishness of men, and the dangers of other women.
The plot is trivial, the characters are all. Beckinsale is impeccable as Lady Susan, while Chloë Sevigny is more than adequate as her confidant. The other ladies are more or less competent in their parts. The other gender – for the most part, their foolishness makes me hesitate to actually place them in the category of men – is also more than adequately represented by their portrayers.
Alas, the pacing of the movie is flawed. For most of the movie, Lady Susan flirts here and there, nearly marries and then breaks the engagement. And then, her erstwhile swain is abruptly married to Lady Susan’s daughter, and then a note is delivered reporting the marriage of Lady Susan herself to the movie’s buffoon. There is no real build to a climax, and perhaps a comedy of manners doesn’t really need such a thing, for the goal seems to be to amuse the audience with a character who can illuminate some of the absurd manners which, oddly enough, serve to oil the machinery of humanity which works none-to-well (with thanks to Heinlein). Still, it instills in the tale a curious flat quality, a sense of no change in the rhythms of the lives of the characters. Characters change, yet life continues apace. Perhaps this is a goal of Mz Austen.
As a final note, at least for American audiences, one must be on the ball and paying close attention. Unlike most contemporary movies in which dialog and images are embossed into the brain much like a design is embossed into a leather gauntlet, Love & Friendship merely presents the dialog, with no cue as to what the importance of this line of dialog might be, or into what genre, if you will, it falls. One must garner from content only whether this is merely operational chatter, or if one character or another is committing a gross violation of the rules of polite society for the benefit of the humors of the audience. Do not plan to play with your smartphone during this flick, for it will serve you poorly.
Ingersoll & Jacoby (the biographer) on secularism, contrasted to Social Darwinism:
A secularist society would mean
“… living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than another … It is striving to do away with violence and vice, with ignorance, poverty and disease … It does not believe in praying and receiving, but in earning and deserving.”
A man who professed this humanistic secular creed could have hardly agreed with [Herbert] Spencer, who frequently said of the poor …
“If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”
In a short biography such as The Great Agnostic (effectively 190 pages, plus an Afterword, which I read, and Appendices, which I skipped) there’s scarcely room to properly treat all of the opinions of the man, and so there’s a lack of logical progression concerning the definition (or results) of a secular society that I would have preferred to have seen; if one plans to rip away the comforting religion to which humanity clings, at least something which can be logically studied should be presented1. So what we have here is a conclusion, not a closely argued discussion: this is how he sees a secular future. Naturally, given that he was a creature of the 19th century, he did not see what are arguably the secular disasters of the 20th century: communism and its Gulag Archipelago. It might also be argued, however, that these were the natural and logical conclusions of a society previously arbitrarily ruled by the Russian supreme rulers, and since such societies typically have some large facet of force to hold them together, in the face of its disappearance, the traditional social norms outside of force are weak and ineffectual. A peaceful society has not had a chance to evolve, and with the exponential development of technology, a combination of immense military power and unrestrained ambition and paranoia came into being, with predictable consequences.
Herbert Spencer was a British philosopher of the day, a friend to Ingersoll, and
During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. “The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century.” Spencer was “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”[3][4] but his influence declined sharply after 1900: “Who now reads Spencer?” asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
Spencer is best known for the expression “survival of the fittest”, which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection …
The quote of Spencer regarding the poor clearly ignores context: would the Royal Family of Britain be subject to such conditions? Of course not. I read it as merely giving cover to the discouraging observation that, with the limitations of the era, the poor could not easily be resolved.
He also seems to have suffered from the intellectual blind spot that anything natural is good, tangible or not. As we all know, arsenic is merely one product of nature inimical to ourselves; it’s worthwhile to ask about any other assumption, and I believe we may come to the conclusion that Social Darwinism does not pass muster, simply based on the obvious fact that it is contradictory to the basic impulse motivating society: we take care of each other. We provide for the common defense, the sick, the elderly, all those who have, or can, contribute to society. We understand that we’re greater together than apart. To use an unfortunate phrase, this is the social contract implicit in society.
This is important because if that contract is broken – if we euthanize the elderly, we walk away from the sick, we fail to care for the unfortunate – then those who have a choice, and something valuable to contribute, may walk away, endangering society by weakening it. A society which has a weak social contract may not attract those who can most contribute to it, and this is a world of competitive societies.
I just finished listening to Chelsea and Hillary’s speeches, and didn’t think them all that noteworthy. However, one thought finally did smack me right in the forehead:
This is the very first Presidential contest in my memory in which the central point of contention isn’t issues, but instead qualifications. I cannot remember, going back to Nixon, any such contest where the fight isn’t going to be so much over positions as whether the Donald Trump possesses the qualities for the office of President1. Does he have the temperament, the stability to be handed the codes? Does he have the experience to run one of the largest government bureaucracies in the world?
What will he do when the leader of North Korea taunts him?
This will be fundamentally different in that rather than evaluating issues, we’ll be evaluating the candidate as the primary criterion – whether he’s too volatile, too hands off, too interested in himself – or not. And this will certainly make it a different election than those to which we’ve become accustomed.
[This post has been updated with the proper title.]
Ever wonder if Donald Trump qualifies as an agent of Russia, secret or overt? Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare are on the case:
Question #1: Is Donald Trump an Agent of a Foreign Power Targetable Under FISA?
Answer: Not On the Current Record.
One way of asking whether a U.S. person is a Manchurian Candidate is to look at whether he meets the criteria for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The fact that we are even writing this sentence about a presidential candidate is a reflection of what a strange year 2016 is.
FISA defines an “agent of a foreign power,” in relevant part, as follows: any person who “knowingly engages in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of a foreign power, which activities involve or may involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States”; or who “pursuant to the direction of an intelligence service or network of a foreign power, knowingly engages in any other clandestine intelligence activities for or on behalf of such foreign power, which activities involve or are about to involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States.”
The DNC hack provides considerable evidence that Trump is the beneficiary of the clandestine activity of “a foreign power.” And there is plenty of evidence that Trump has spoken in a fashion that would reasonably please the foreign actor in question. But there is no evidence at all that Trump has engaged in or abetted clandestine espionage activity himself, much less that he has done so in probable violation of any U.S. law.
So if the Manchurian Candidate question is one of whether Trump is a Putin agent within the meaning of FISA, the public record certainly does not support that.
The political punditry has certainly had reason to buzz over the Trump candidacy, but lately it’s been expressing a new emotion: fear. Andrew Sullivan appears to be nearly breaking down during his live-blogging, Steve Benen has certainly expressed deep concern, and now Steve reports Ezra Klein, too, is deeply worried:
Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote a compelling piece last week on the degree to which Trump has left him, on a very personal level, feeling scared. The night of the Republican’s convention speech, Ezra said he felt “genuinely” afraid for “the first time since I began covering American politics.”
Ezra added yesterday, after Trump’s bizarre press conference in which he called for Russian intervention in the U.S. election, “It’s weird to keep saying this, but this is not okay. This is not a man with the temperament, the steadiness, the discipline to be president. The issue here isn’t left versus right, or liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican. It’s crazy versus not crazy.”
After watching Obama’s endorsement speech last night, Trump is in the unfortunate position of being implicitly compared to a man who stepped into a very difficult position and really hit the ball out of the ballpark. Never a panicked move, hardly any mistakes, zero scandals, just a Congressional GOP that forgot how to compromise. This is not to excuse Trump, of course, but merely to point out the stark contrast between the current occupant, well trained in the government sector, and a businessman whose very competency may not be all we’d like to think.
Responses to the RNC second night coverage:
Even the formerly disgraced won’t associate themselves with Trump. Speaks volumes.
Another responds to the first:
… there is going to be a lot of butt sniffing when he is elected. Politicians don’t forget.
Carrying a grudge? Perhaps on the Republican side – but on the Democratic side I see that the winners don’t ride roughshod over the losers, as Obama hired Hillary 8 years ago, and has now enthusiastically endorsed her and plans to campaign for her.
On the other side, Trump is reportedly considering starting a super PAC – for taking vengeance on his vanquished foes. That’s yet another new political behavior.
We’re home from a vacation trip (Atlanta, Traverse City (MI)) and getting our lives put back together here; back to work on Monday.
We’ll post any pictures we think are worthy.
Tim Kaine came out and introduced himself, and then proceeded to attack Trump fairly effectively, although I must admit he seems to be just a bit of a doofus. This is not a bad thing, it’s just an apparent characteristic which is probably misleading.
Now, after a lovely introduction by a “gold star mother” (lost a son in Afghanistan) and a video aimed to give viewers an insight / reminder of how many crises Obama has faced, the President emerges and shows why he may be the leading orator of the age. After humor designed to connect to the audience, he affirms his faith in the Nation, covers his successes – which his opponents may deny, but are often confirmable with a bit of research – and is now connecting Hillary to his history.
His sense of pacing and the audience, his clear voice and control of his tone, and the content (does he write his own?), allows listeners to connect to him and his policies. As he argues for Hillary, as he bears witness to Hillary’s achievements and experience, he makes her believable, because he’s been there.
Now a shout-out to Kaine, affirming Hillary’s choice.
As Obama beats on Trump, for which there is so much evidence, his calm confidence at the microphone is as amazing as it is with Bill. He reminds us that since the election of 2000, the Republicans have been made up of third-raters – and the Democrats have managed to rise above them in terms of competence. Not necessarily in guerilla marketing, it’s true – but in bringing an understanding of American laws and traditions to the serious task of governance.
This is a speech to rally the Democrats, to remind them that they have to vote to win – a problem for Democrats, for reasons I don’t really fathom. Independents should find it reassuring, especially as facts are cited, connected to the narrative of the President – but this is connecting Democrat’s principles to positive results. He reminds the crowd that democracy is not a one day thing, but an everyday thing – he defines democracy, how hard it is, and how everyone must work at it in order for it work for us – rather than for just a few.
So, I wonder … what will Obama do next January? In a few years will he be looking at returning to the Senate? He’d be joining a very small club (Johnson and JQ Adams). But he can contribute without occupying an elective office.
And what, in 50 years, will historians say about him? I can’t wait to find out.
Later: and out pops Hillary for a thank you hug. Nice touch. Trump dead-enders must be furious – Trump is so outclassed as to look like a fumbler.
In the past I’ve explored my thoughts on the compartmentalization of society and why the use of the operationality of one sector may not be appropriate to another, despite the enthusiasm of supporters – we’ve seen this in the debacle of private prisons, for example. Briefly, it’s a problem of disparate goals: processes inevitably reflect the goals of the developers, and if the goals of the developers are not congruent with those of the sector into which they are being imported then unintended, unwanted consequences will occur.
Continuing the thread on the candidacy of Donald Trump with this in mind, I think the recent insanity we hear coming from Trump, such as calling for the intelligence service of Russia to “find” Clinton e-mails, is reflective of his lack of training in the government sector, which is the sector responsible for international relations and safeguarding the nation, in combination with his own outré business strategies of not taking any contract obligation seriously, which we can abstract to doing anything to win.
This would be interesting in small doses, but it also requires a sense of honor in order to navigate this new path successfully, and given Trump’s business history, there is no sense that he has a sense of honor; and while the private sector participants should have a sense of honor in order to proceed, it appears Trump uses his superior financial position to cheat those he deals with on a regular basis. For all that he brags of success, you do have to wonder how much more successful he might have been had he possessed a working sense of honor.
So I circle back to the original point: Trump’s lack of training and experience in the government sector leads to his foolishness. He runs without studying the area, he just shoots his mouth off – and the naïve lap it up. He thinks he knows Russia because … why? He was a beauty contestant judge in Russia once?
Now this may just be an attempt to counteract the new life story of Hillary as presented by Bill Clinton last night, a powerful and enlightening story for those who’ve not paid attention or are so young as to think she’s irrelevant – he implies there’s something hidden in those emails, without having to prove it. To credulous minds, this will work. He may not expect anything to come of such a call – it’s all another dishonest tactic, just like how he treats painters, electricians, and plumbers – screw them over.
Robert Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) is the subject of the biography The Great Agnostic, by Susan Jacoby. As one might expect from the title, Ingersoll was a freethinker, an agnostic, an atheist; but as a highly successful & articulate lawyer, he became a highly visible and surprisingly popular advocate for freethinking, and, by the reverse side of that coin, a fierce critic of religion. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was schooled to a thorough knowledge of religion, and when he chose a life of, to paraphrase, “freeing men and women from fear”, he came well-equipped.
I have not yet finished TGA, but have decided to quote some relevant remarks from Mz. Jacoby and quotes from Ingersoll while I’m thinking about them. I’m a little concerned this may be a hagiography rather than a proper biography, as the worst criticism Mz. Jacoby has leveled is that of ‘portliness’, at least so far. Regardless, the quotes are presumably verifiable and provoked thought in their relevance to today.
From page 116:
Ingersoll considered the passage of laws that turned Chinese into a special category of American residents without constitutional rights as not only morally wrong but wrong in terms of American self-interest, since Chinese made up one-fourth of the human race and Americans surely wanted to trade with that country.
“After all, it pays to do right. This is a hard truth to learn — especially for a nation. A great nation should be bound by the highest conception of justice and honor … It should remember that its responsibilities are in accordance with its power and intelligence.”
There’s a couple of thoughts here. First, the welcome congruency to my own thought that principles are not simple arbitrary rules that are to be followed, as at least I was taught growing up, but actually have positive consequences accruing to their adherence. I have to wonder if this connection should be more firmly taught to our youth; or if the connection is not as strong as it ought to be as the upper classes take advantage of the virtuous lower classes. Neither thought is original, and might even be considered clichés, but a cliché is not false because of this status, merely tired. The application to Trump business practices should be obvious.
Second, the connection between power and responsibility is drawn. The current GOP themes of using the worst and most insulting tactics in regard to Muslims, both naturalized and aliens, comes directly to mind as violating this dictate, and the consequences of dismaying our allies, as well as discouraging those who are ambivalent, are negative and evidence of an immature mind.
Feel free to send your own thoughts using the mail link on the right. More to come as I find and urge to transcribe from the book.
As Bill Clinton gives the keynote speech I’m reminded that he’s one of the best orators of the current era. Against the background of years of Republic deprecation, he’s humanizing her in a wonderful way, by telling a story that gives her motivations, her accomplishments, and more importantly her self-doubts, and her successful efforts to overcome them. This understanding of how the human race, for the most part, adores a good story, the story of the underdog who fights for the good.
He makes canny mention of her working with such Republicans as DeLay and Gingrich, and the positive words they have, perhaps incautiously, spoken of her. This speaks to her ability to work with all sides to create solutions to problems, to ignore ideological problems – an implied condemnation of GOP recalcitrance over the last 8 years.
And, as her husband, he can testify to her with authenticity; but he also does it with humor that reveals both his and her foibles, that he courted a woman he found attractive, she was independent and refused to assent to his proposals and made him work for the marriage. This transforms the overall political narrative from a picture of a grasping, cold-hearted bitch who wants power for power’s sake, to the picture of a woman person motivated by the needs of those in need of help, whether it be veterans, women, or her favorite – children. The crowd is going wild as Bill now exudes, with sincerity, his observations and belief at her ability as a “changemaker”.
Now he mentions how he was sent to West Virginia, a state they knew she’d lose in primaries, to tell the coalminers that if and when she became President, she’d come to West Virginia to try to help them. This is to counter the opposition story thread of Clinton vindictiveness.
He finishes up with a laundry list of accomplishments, diverse and inspirational, if sometimes obscure and a little hurried, and then a final, perhaps slightly weak ending, an encouragement to vote for her.
Ah! An interview with an audience member makes me realize this also introduces Hillary to younger voters who don’t know the story.
Now Meryl Streep is telling the story of a woman in the Revolutionary Army who took a bullet for George Washington, and now tries link that woman (I didn’t catch the name) to a series of other famous ladies, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, to Hillary. It’s an appeal to emotion, as it does not reveal anything new personally or politically about Hillary. Just a rah-rah moment.
I didn’t get to see the other speakers tonight, but I daresay Bill was the big cannon in what may be his final major speech, and I’d say he more or less nailed it. It was aimed at the independents who may think they know about Hillary, but Bill set out to set them straight on their perceptions by giving the story – a real story, one that resonates with the classic elements of story-telling and with verifiable facts (I should think).
The RNC sought to resonate with their delegates, and to some extent they managed it – and the performance of Trump and his surrogates reflected the nature of those delegates. If you watched or read about the RNC, then you understand that it ran on a mythos unrelated to reality, or for that matter an understanding of the traditions of American politics.
The DNC, too, has tried to resonate with the delegates, and again it’s a reflection of the delegates. The boisterous booing of Sanders delegates looked bad, but the overt multiculturalism, the messages of hope, and the refusal to indulge in outright hatred of the opposition – contrast with the disgraceful calls for imprisoning and executing Hillary at the RNC – should be a message to the independents and moderate and ex-Republicans that the Democrats remember and hold sacred the best traditions of American politics.
The NOAA ship Okeanos recently completed an exploration of the deep Marianas Trench. Here’s a few of the things they found:
More here.
In this post I suggested the GOP rank and file are being trained to be victims. I’m not the only one, as James Hoggan notes in NewScientist (16 July 2016):
One would hope that evidence and reasoned debate would rule. But reality doesn’t matter to the likes of Trump, who sees himself as more powerful than mere facts. Yale philosopher Jason Stanley says such figures ruthlessly prey on public fears to reconstruct reality to pander to them.
Many people feel beleaguered, notes psychologist Bryant Welch. Trying to keep pace with change places ever greater demands on the brain, and this combines with worries about immigration policy, the economy, unemployment, terrorism, climate change and security. Anxiety makes the crowd turn to a powerful commander.
The danger is that the more this happens, the weaker and less capable people become. Welch compares it to a heroin addict craving larger and larger doses to get the same high. People are mainlining the Trump drug, a cocktail of absolute certainty, strong opinion and talk of control.
And then it becomes a self-perpetuating vortex as those who have assented to the all powerful leader continue to become more and more dependent. It’s essential that Trump not only lose, but lose big-time – and I fear that the blunder of Debbie Wasserman Schultz may make this impossible. We may be in for a long period of embittered people who – if we’re lucky – saw their leader lose an election; excuse me, no doubt the verb will be stolen. After all, combining this with the religious certainty of the fundamentalist and they will be certain they’ve been wronged.
I was too tired to subject myself to the traditional political raz-ma-taz of a convention last night, a decision I rather regret given the highly positive reviews I’ve been seeing of Michelle Obama’s speech. Glancing through the Andrew Sullivan live-blog, though, I do see that there was some heckling of Elizabeth Warren (!), attributed to the Sanders supporters:
You know, I didn’t cover this primary election but watching some of these Bernie supporters throw various hissy fits, I wonder if I would have found myself backing Clinton. I understand the passion but they sure come off as assholes. Sanders himself was far better – poised, happy to have swung the debate his way, and endorsing Clinton without any serious caveats at all.
I find it far harder to call them assholes in view of the revelations of the activities of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chairman who appears to have favored Clinton over Sanders in substantial ways despite rules stating that the DNC should remain neutral during the primaries.
I’ve been poking around just a little, and it appears many observers are looking at Schultz’s future. I think that this is really a secondary issue, despite her position as a Representative for Florida, a state up for grabs. Instead, as Trump continues to look more than a little suspect no matter the issue, this is the time for Clinton to look like the old-time saviour of the nation, to do so she must appeal to the independents who seem to view her with suspicion.
The fact that Schultz favored her will, instead, once again cast black suspicion on Hillary. I’ve yet to see any reports indicating the leaked emails suggest that Hillary knew she was being awarded improper help – much less having actually illicitly requested it. Nevertheless, suspicious independents as well as moderate Republicans (such as former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg), urged on by the right wing, will be tempted to think that just such has occurred – and because there’s no effective way to deny it, the tar will stick.
So when the Sanders supporters, already miffed at Bernie’s loss in the primaries, are faced with the news of a conspiracy against Sanders at the highest levels of the Party, is it any surprise that they react with disrespect – even when it’s progressive icon Elizabeth Warren? They know they’ve been screwed over. If you don’t express your discontent at being screwed, you’ll never be respected.
But in the bigger picture, the real matter of concern is the perception of Hillary as once again engaged in dirty politics. Whether or not she has ever been in the past, the perception, from national polls, is that she cannot be trusted. From Gallup:
I’m left wondering how Schultz didn’t understand the importance of following the rules, and how this places her favorite in peril of losing this election. Trump should be so vulnerable that his post-convention bounce was miniscule, but with this disaster, neither candidate appears to be reasonably pristine – and that’s a problem. Only one has the experience to be trusted with nuclear weapons and to recognize the dangers posed by Russia, while the other appears to be carrying water for Putin. But instead of this being crystal clear to the majority of the electorate, we’re instead pre-occupied with questions of the trustability of a former Senator and Secretary who has performed competently and honorably in her previous positions.
If we find the country at risk in December, a substantial portion of the blame should be placed at Schultz’s feet.
And now for some lovely family portraits. Some may seem familiar, of course, like any good portrait.
Some of the gangly teenagers in this one.
Uncle Henry, there in the foreground, has a lovely set of broad shoulders.
A casual shot of the family gossiping.
This appears to be some angry aunts. Best not to inquire about the roast turkey.
Sally Adee throws some cold water on the fears of Elon Musk, et al, in the pages of NewScientist (16 July 2016, paywall), suggesting that even the phrase “artificial intelligence” is misleading – because the computers aren’t really thinking:
“The black magic seduction of neural networks has always been that by some occult way, they will learn from data so they can understand things they have never seen before,” says Mark Bishop at Goldsmiths University of London. Their complexity (157 layers in one case) helps people suspend disbelief and imagine that the algorithms will converge to form some kind of emergent intelligence. But it’s still just a machine built on rule-based mathematical systems, says Schank.
In 2014, a paper that could be seen as the successor to the Lighthill report punctured holes in the belief that neural networks do anything even remotely akin to actual understanding.
Instead, they recognise patterns, finding relationships in data sets that are so complex that no human can see them. This matters because it disproves the idea that they could develop an understanding of the world. A neural network can say a cat is a cat, but it has no concept of what a cat is. It cannot differentiate between a real cat or a picture of one.
The paper isn’t the only thing giving people deja vu. Schank and others see money pouring into deep learning and the funnelling of academic talent.
“When the field focuses too heavily on short-term progress by only exploring the strength of a single technique, this can lead to a long-term dead end,” says Kenneth Friedman, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who adds that the AI and computer science students around him are flocking to deep learning.
So the suggestion is that the AI field may be pursuing another dead-end approach to discovering actual thinking machines. While not everyone agrees on this point, Roger Schrank at Northwestern University says:
“The beginning and the end of the problem is the term AI,” says Schank. “Can we just call it ‘cool things we do with computers’?”
In other news, also from NewScientist, comes word of new EU regulations which will impact the more mysterious computing systems:
Soon, you may have the right to ask the inscrutable algorithms involved to explain themselves.
In April this year, the European parliament approved the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new set of rules governing personal data. Due to go into effect in 2018, it introduces a “right to explanation”: the opportunity for European Union citizens to question the logic of an algorithmic decision – and contest the results.
In life some things can be controlled and some cannot, and a key to sanity is having at least some control. The more we are at the mercy of the unfeeling vortex, the less happy we become, and the more bad decisions we make. The software engineers may whine about it, but I’ll happily applaud this decision and hope this idea may make its way over the Atlantic.
Steve Benen @ Maddowblog notes the Trump campaign has decided to question the honesty of various government agencies:
Late last week, as Donald Trump made claims about the U.S. crime rate that were demonstrably untrue, many began to wonder why the campaign was presenting fiction as fact. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, said the FBI’s data may show a steady decline in the crime rate, but Americans shouldn’t necessarily trust the FBI. Federal law enforcement, Manafort argued, is “suspect these days.”
Three days later, Don Trump Jr. appeared on CNN in his official capacity as a campaign surrogate, and Jake Tapper reminded him that not only has the crime rate improved, but “unemployment is much, much lower than when President Obama took office. Trump Jr. wasn’t impressed.
“These are artificial numbers, Jake. These are numbers that are massaged to make the existing economy look good and make the administration look good when in fact it’s a total disaster.”
It prompted the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein to note, “So, to be clear, the Trump campaign trusts the National Enquirer but not the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
So – I know the Trump campaign surrogates are focused on winning the election and aren’t thinking beyond that – what happens a year after winning and they try to claim some achievement based on, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Everyone just sneers and returns the same accusations?
This is a very divisive situation. The institutions that deliver stability and trustable information are crucial in today’s data-heavy society, and by implying, without solid information, that the numbers are not trustworthy is to drive another wedge between Americans. Now if they had some solid evidence then they’d be worth listening to, but if all they have are complaints that the numbers don’t match those predicted by ideology, as Steve reports, then perhaps your ideology isn’t sacred.
By assuming the government agencies which reported the terrible statistics of the Bush Administration are now handmaidens to the current Administration betrays a mindset similar to the Communists at their worst. Either put up the evidence, boys, or shut up.
For those of us who pay attention to quantum mechanics comes a possible solution to the conundrum of observation. Speaking as a simple software engineer, it has never made sense to say that for some (very small) entity, its various attributes do not have set values until it comes under observation. This is known as the Copenhagen interpretation:
… it says that a particle’s state before observation is fundamentally, intrinsically, insurmountably uncertain. If the wave function says a particle could be here and there, then it really is here and there, however hard that is to fathom in terms of everyday experience. Only the act of looking at a quantum object “collapses” its wave function, jolting it from a shadowy netherworld into definite reality.
Not only is it intuitively puzzling, it also leaves open important questions concerning how the Universe ever got started. I’ve given some thought to the possibility that, if true, it might constitute a clue as to whether we’re in a computer simulation, and this is an artifact of late resolution of “reality”, but it’s hard to see my way to really believing that.
And now perhaps that won’t be necessary. From NewScientist (16 July 2016, paywall) comes a longish article on the work of Daniel Sudarsky of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who is extending a theory from the 1970s:
… Sudarsky began with a third option: that wave functions are real things and do indeed collapse – but randomly, by themselves. “Something like a measurement occurs, but without anybody actually measuring,” says Sudarsky. It doesn’t need a human observer, so this process is known as an objective collapse.
Objective collapse would be rare, but catching. Wait for a single particle’s wave function to collapse and you could be waiting longer than the age of the universe. Group many particles together, however, and the chance swiftly escalates. With a few billion particles, you might only have to wait a few seconds for one wave function to collapse – and for that to set the rest off.
Objective collapse theory was first put forward in the 1970s by Philip Pearle at Hamilton College in New York, and later refined by Giancarlo Ghirardi and Tulio Weber at the University of Trieste and Alberto Rimini at the University of Pavia, Italy. Their goal was to tweak Schrödinger’s equation so that the wave function evolves naturally, without an observer, from a mix of states into a single, well-defined state. To do so, they added a couple of extra mathematical terms: a non-linear term, which rapidly promotes one state at the expense of others, and a stochastic term, which makes that happen at random.
At least superficially, these tweaks can explain quite a lot that’s inexplicable about quantum theory. We never see ghostly quantum effects in large objects such as cats or the moon because, with so many interacting particles, their wave functions readily collapse or else never form. And in the early universe, as Sudarsky and physicist-philosopher Elias Okon, also at UNAM, showed a decade ago, it was only a matter of time before the wave functions of matter collapsed into an uneven distribution from which stars and galaxies could form, God or no God.
All still tentative, but it’s good to see someone takes my intuitive unease seriously and is investigating an alternative to one of the most successful scientific theories ever.
Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com reports on the new mayor of Turin, Italy, and her primary focus:
It is into this firmly entrenched culinary tradition that Chiara Appendino has stepped. She is the controversial new mayor of Turin, a large city of over 870,000 people in the industrial northwest region of Piedmont that is famous for its food, primarily cured meats, and for being the birthplace of the Slow Food movement.
Appendino has announced her intention to promote vegetarianism and veganism in Turin. In a document outlining her plan for the city in 2016-2021, Appendino states that her government will prioritize
“The promotion of vegetarian and vegan diets throughout the municipality as an fundamental act that will protect the environment, health, and animals through awareness-building actions on the ground.”
The statement is consistent with Appendino’s strong stance on animal rights. Her Manifesto promises to “promote a culture of respect that recognizes all animals as having rights”and to make curricular changes in schools that include educating kids about “protection and respect for animals and proper nutrition in collaboration with animal welfare organizations and nutritionists.”
As Katherine notes, meat is a central part of the cuisine of Turin and Italy, and I would not expect a mass conversion of the citizenry to veganism nor vegetarianism. In my view, the philosophical defenses of vegetarianism are defective in that they ignore the biological requirements given to use by evolution. However, I will grant that it seems as if humanity is often at its best when it is defying the dictates of evolution; and Social Darwinism, the imposition of the perceived dictates of evolution on human society in the form of condemning the poor for the sin of being poor, without ever following the logic of justice in the implementation of same (and that would be such things as banning inheritance and any other activity, outside of the control of the newborn, which might give one newborn an advantage over another), is a repugnant mechanism to those who realize that society doesn’t exist to encapsulate cut-throat competition, but for the age-old exigencies: to safeguard all those who choose to join and are willing to contribute.
A little off-course.
The point being, evolution is a natural mechanism, not an idol to be adored, so it’s worth exploring the variants; and, in any case, we eat too much meat (& fish), so I expect the mayor’s campaign should have a positive effect, regardless of how close she comes to her nominative goal.
